Dumb Moves in Piracy

This is one of the stupider things I've seen this week. There are going to be two new, unskippable copyright notices before actual DVD content. And yes, they will show every time you want to watch the movie and will always be unskippable.

An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will "come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through."

The idea isn't to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It's to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, "Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort."

The idea seems to be to mildly inconvenience that people that are actually paying for their media. And considering that if you go to a movie in a multiplex, you're most likely going to see an anti-piracy add, or have any recollection of the lawsuits for illegally downloading music, you are already aware that piracy is a big issue. People already ignore the FBI warning, now everyone is just going to learn to ignore for longer. I don't have many nice things to say about VHS, but at least one could fast-forward through that crap (remember the days when one of the advantages to DVDs was that they didn't have a bunch of trailers and other crap before the content?).

Oh, and you know what doesn't make you sit through this junk? Pirated movies. Nice work, goofy government agency...